School shootings

A school shooting is a form of mass shooting involving an armed attack on an educational institution, such as a school or university. The U.S. Secret Service defines them as shootings where schools are "deliberately selected as the location for the attack". These shootings have sparked a political debate over gun violence, zero tolerance policies and gun control. While educational institutions are subject to attacks by outside terrorist groups (for example the Garissa University College attack), this article mainly covers students who plan and carry out murders on their campuses.

The United States has the highest number of school-related shootings. From 2013 to October 2015 there were 142 school shootings in the United States.

School shootings are a topic of regarding interest in the United States. A thorough study of 37 incidents involving 41 perpetrators in the United States from 1974 through June 2000 by the Secret Service warned against the belief that a certain "type" of student would be a perpetrator. Any profile would fit too many students to be useful and may not apply to a potential perpetrator. Some lived with both parents in "an ideal, All-American family." Some were children of divorce, or lived in foster homes. A few were loners, but most had close friends. Some experts such as Alan Lipman have warned against the dearth of empirical validity of profiling methods.

While it may be simplistic to assume a straightforward "profile", the study did find certain similarities among the perpetrators. "The researchers found that killers do not 'snap'. They plan. They acquire weapons. These children take a long, considered, public path toward violence." Princeton's Katherine Newman has found that, far from being "loners", the perpetrators are "joiners" whose attempts at social integration fail, and that they let their thinking and even their plans be known, sometimes frequently over long periods of time. In addition, psychologist Peter Langman has noted that school shooters typically fall into one (or occasionally two) of three categories: psychopathic, psychotic, or traumatized.

Perpetrators who "run amok" in schools and other public settings do also share in common a severe lapse or more pervasive deficit in their capacity for empathy coupled with their inability to contain their aggression—this may be due to their psychopathy, psychotic symptoms (i.e. loss of a sense of reality), and/or to a consequence of significant violent traumatization—such as that of early physical abuse, that contributes to the development of dissociative states of mind (i.e. disavowal of reality, derealization, depersonalization). In short, as clinical psychiatrist Daniel Schechter has written, for a baby to develop into a troubled adolescent who then turns lethally violent, a convergence of multiple interacting factors must occur, that is "every bit as complicated...as it is for a tornado to form on a beautiful spring day in Kansas."

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